sigpending - checks if SIGUSR1 signals are pending on a process that alternatively masks and umasks this signal

mmapfork - rapidly spawn multiple child processes that try to allocate a chunk of free memory (and try to avoid swapping). Each process then uses madvise(2) to hints before and after the memory is memset and then the child dies.

made the --aggressive option more aggressive by forcing more CPU migrations and context switches.

I have also added a thermal zone stats gathering option --tz to see how warm the machine is getting when running a test. For example:

... where x86_pkg_temp is the CPU package temperature and acpitz are the two ACPI thermal zones on my desktop.

Stress-ng is being used to run stress test various kernels across a range of Ubuntu devices, such as phone, desktop and server. Thrashing a system with hundreds of processes and a lot of low memory pressure is just one method of checking that kernel and daemons can handle a mix of demanding work loads.

stress-ng 0.04.12 is now available in Ubuntu Wily. See the stress-ng project page for more details.